E-voting commission finds mislaid submissions

6 Apr 2004

In a development laden with irony, it has emerged that five submissions made to the Commission on Electronic Voting were not detected until after the deadline for entries had passed.

The authors had made their submissions through the CEV website and had been informed the entries were received, although the subsequent tally of replies, after the 26 March deadline, did not originally include their contributions.

The omission came to light when a list was published of the submissions made to the CEV and the writers of five entries realised their names were not included. According to a spokesperson for the Commission, the five submissions were not originally included because they had been stored on another computer.

Since being discovered, the extra submissions have been added to the original list of 157; as with the others they are now available for the public to view and will be considered along with the other entries. As reported in siliconrepublic.com, the majority of the 157 submissions were overwhelmingly against the introduction of e-voting in its current form.

Unsurprisingly the lobby group Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-voting has pounced on the issue as a chance to renew its calls for a paper audit trail in the Government’s proposed electronic voting system.

“This is similar to the verifiability we need in electronic voting,” said Colm MacCárthaigh, a representative of ICTE. “When the authors made their submissions, the system informed them they had been recorded but it was not until the final list was published that it was evident they had not. With the Powervote/Nedap Electronic Voting system there is no means by which a voter can verify their vote has been recorded correctly, similar problems would have gone unnoticed.”